Stage 4 – The ‘Combination’ Phase

*** You must keep an eye on this mixture, stir frequently and make sure it does not burn at all.

After the mixture has been well heated through, take off the heat and leave to cool.

When cool, blend it all up with a stick blender and taste. If it is too tart add more sugar. At Zaal, we added another 2 chefs spoons worth of caster sugar as Az didnt realize how concentrated the tamarind was and we added a whole chefs spoons worth.

Pour into a tray too cool, then chill in the fridge.

There are lots of uses for this, the main ones being a CTM and a Roshney Chicken.

To make it into a CTM (Chicken Tikka Masala) just add one heaped chefs spoon of this massala to 2 ladles of base and stir in some single cream and reduce until the right thickness – it tastes very nice.

Zaal Restaurant Mix Powder

This is the actual mix powder Az’s assistant at Zaal restaurant was preparing on our lesson. It was surely the biggest amount of mix powder I’ve ever seen! Obviously it needs scaling down for home use. In fact Az said it would last his chef about a week. He prefers to use East End / Natco brand of spices.

The curry powder he uses is mild madras, not Eastern Star. It’s very important to make your own garam masala. Az said most takeaways make their own and the pre made stuff is no good. He’d never heard of Jaipur garam masala although he did know of their existence of producing spices.

Boil it for at least an hour, making sure the bottom doesn’t catch. If it does add a little more water. There is not an exact cooking time as to when it’s ready. Like most things it is done by eye and when the onions begin to ‘melt’ it is time to move to the next stages.

Akhni Stock Stage

Medium saucepan on the boil and add a few Cinnamon sticks, a small handful of green cardamon pods and about six bay leaves. Leave to boil for about ten minutes then strain the mixture and put the strained water into the original onion and carrot base.

*** Avoid just adding the whole spices to the original mixture – this may seem like a shortcut but is a recipe for disaster. You would have trouble trying to fish them out and the whole spices will never blend smooth enough to leave in the base. The Akhni stock whole spices can be recycled and used again.

Cook the spice mix fairly hard taking care not to burn the spices. It is important to cook the rawness out of the spices. It helps to add the blended tomatoes a spoon at a time to keep the mixture moving.

After cooking for around 4 minutes add to the blended onion mixture. Bring the mixture to the boil and then leave to simmer. As it simmers on the stove top the oil will gradually rise to the surface. This is a good indicator that the base is now ready.

Leave to cool then thoroughly blend. Note that the base may need thinning with water at this stage if it is too thick.

The gravy made should be slightly sweet with just a mild curry flavour so it could be used in everything from a Vindaloo to a Tikka Massla. This quantity of ingredients will produce around 16 or more 350ml portions of gravy. If done right, you may well notice that your curry’s now actually smell of that magic aroma that one associates with a good British Indian Restaurant (BIR).

Most certainly the holy grail of (BIR) British Indian Restaurant style cooking forums on the internet.

This is an excellent forum where the subject is taken very seriously with expert advice. Well worth the time to register and look around. Especially the very helpful FAQ and beginners questions area. A must read.

(Based on Indian restaurant style – but far tastier & fresher than your average take-away)

Ingredients: (Serves 2 x main or 4 x side approx)

Vegetable / Olive oil (or ghee if you like)

1&1/2 inch length of fresh ginger grated

3 garlic cloves finely sliced (TBH I would use 6, but you have to be considerate to friends & family)

2 to 3 onions (small to medium) coarsely chopped

1 to 2 green chilli’s finely chopped (Depends on strength)

400g potatoes cubed approx 1&1/2 inches

1 tsb garam masala

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsb groung coriander

¾ tsp tumeric (generous ½ if you see what I mean.)

½ tsp Salt

300g bag fresh spinach leaves

Cooking Instructions

Rinse the spinach in a colander, lightly shake excess water off and place into a large cooking pan with lid and very gently simmer in its own moisture for 10 minutes. Then drain the cooked spinach using a slotted spatula or similar to press out and remove wetness and juice. Tip onto chopping board and lightly cube up with sharp knife. (I recommend doing this on the draining board, so it is easy to wash away the inevitable overflow of spinach juice).

Part boil potato cubes for 3 to 4 minutes until slightly cooked and quite firm. Some people prefer pure pan cooking, but I always find the rest of the ingredients are past their best by the time the potatoes are done. (Make life easy for yourself, just part boil them a little). Then drain.

I always like to get my ingredients ready before I start cooking to prevent missing a herb etc. Here we see this, and I would like to point out the pink stereo in the corner belongs to someone else!.

When onions are slightly golden, add drained potatoes and mix gently for 2 to 3 minutes. Then add all other spices except the garam masala. Mix all very gently together and cook for around 5 to 6 minutes on a medium heat, until potatoes are cooked but firm. Do not let anything burn. Add a few drops of water or a splash of oil and, or reduce heat a little if necessary.

Now add your drained and chopped spinach, gently mix in, so it is combined with the dish, but still clearly defined. Now sprinkle / mix in the garam masala and cook gently for a further 2 -3 minutes. I cannot stress how critical the garam masala is to the recipe, it is the essential final touch. Make sure it is properly mixed in, but don’t risk turning the dish to mush to achieve that.

Jeena’s Kitchen Onion Bhaji Recipe

Added bonus – ease and time – that this recipe requires no deep fat frying, rather oven baking – so possibly more healthy too!

Note, personally had a little grief with these little buggers gluing themselves to the baking tin. Cooked this a couple of times now, and tried different methods of lubrication (ooer) and different tins too – still stuck like bars*ards. Oh well probably just my rubbish baking tins. I would also recommend upping the temp to something like 200C plus a little extra time for non fan assisted ovens – like my rubbish one. Just keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t burn the first time you make them.

As usual here are some pictures.

This is our raw Bhaji mix.

These are our lovely looking cooked Bhaji’s. They are excellent, by the way!

I think you will agree, they look very nice. Please give the recipe a try! – BTW I used Gram flour for mine.

Cube the chicken breast fillets.
Mix tomato puree in bowl with fenugreek, fennel, ginger,
ground coriander, garlic, chilli powder, turmeric, lemon juice, salt
can of tomatoes.
Heat oil in large frying pan and fry onions with the curry leaves until chicken
is golden then add chicken and stir until sealed.
Pour the tomato sauce and spice mix into the pan and stir for 2 minutes.
lower the heat and cook for 20 minutes.

Well, this is about a time saving mini chopper to save us time in cooking yummy curries. By helping us super speedily chop our ingredients and additionally, this post is about some nice looking chillis I saw in Sano’s.

Here is a picture of the ‘mini chopper’, and it is rather nice! indeed rather cute. Hopefully this will save us a bunch of time fine chopping our onions and chillis. Plus this should also prevent us getting the chilli on our hands and wiping it in our eyes when we chop our onions which make our eyes water. This can be especially important when dealing with very hot chilli.

Right. I suppose we had better chop up some stuff for a curry. What better than some lovely Scotch Bonnet Chilli. Lets chop two of them whole (minus stalks). We want our curry nice and hot so seeds are naturally included.

I draw your attention to the rather boastful claim that they are ‘very hot’ with a whole four chilli mark scale on the packet.

Right, lets poke this stuff into our mini chopper and see how we get on. As you can see there is plenty of room for an onion and a pair of chillis. With room to spare too.

Litterally five seconds of quick pulses on the switch, which has by the way two positions (fast and slow) we have some proper time saving chopping!.

But, the question is how does this chilli stack up to being part of a Vindaloo?

Not bad, but add a third chilli to a portion fit for four, if you are looking for a real Vindaloo experience.